In 1966 Robert Venturi, in his fundamental publication Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, challenged one of the basic principles of the Modern Movement: the idea that the quality of a work of architecture coincided with its coherence, the purity of its language and formal unity. On the contrary, Venturi asserted the value of complexity, contradiction and the coexistence of apparently irreconcilable conditions.

Rather than support the logic of either-or he favored a concept of both-and, insisting that the more architecture was able to bring opposites together, the richer it would be. In that same year, Aldo Rossi published The Architecture of the City, a work that was destined to redefine the relationship between project and context. While Venturi focused on the complexity of the shape, Rossi reminded us that the city is built through a slow process of permanence and change, where every new building measures itself against a collective memory, sedimented in time. Two different perspectives, but united by the idea that the new project cannot be reduced either to a self-referential gesture or to a simple repetition of existing works. It is a reflection that contemporary projects come up against over and over.

A building can choose to reiterate a character of place, using the same materials, proportions and languages, or it can declare its independence, introducing a formal and linguistic distance with respect to its surroundings. These are only apparently contrasting approaches: integration does not depend necessarily on resemblance, nor must contrast inevitably coincide with fracture. When the project grows out of a profound reading and understanding of the place, even dissonance can become a form a dialogue.

A building that deliberately interrupts the visual harmony of the context is not necessarily a foreign body: it can, on the contrary, highlight the character of the landscape or of the city, establishing a dialectic relationship in which the new and existing buildings define each other reciprocally.

The difference then becomes a tool of knowledge, capable of valorizing both parties. Naturally, contrast is not a value in itself. If reduced to a self-referential gesture or formal provocation, it risks producing an isolated object, impoverishing as much the existing heritage as the quality of the new work. It is a fragile condition, one that required good sense, awareness and a thorough understanding of the local logic. It is only then that the tension between past and present, between continuity and discontinuity, become meaningful project concepts capable of generating a new understanding of the place as a whole.

The projects collected in this issue of Area, deriving from widely diverse geographical and cultural contexts, are meant to illustrate just this potential. They are not a manifesto in favor of iconic architecture, nor do they celebrate mimetics as the only possible strategy. They show, above all, how the relationship with the context can be built through different degrees of proximity and distance, and how the identity of a place can be strengthened as much by harmony as by contrast. The introductory essay by Valerio Paolo Mosco expands this reflection through the theme of polar opposition, showing us how the history of architecture is rich in pairs of opposites – abstraction and figuration, monument and fabric, continuity and discontinuity – in which comparison and contrast are the chief engines of form. It is a perspective that invites the readers to set aside ideology in their evaluation of the relationship between new and pre-existent architecture, recognizing that, more than simple opposition, the real terrain of the project is dialectic. Hopefully, this is the precise lesson that emerges from the selection of works presented in these pages: context is not a rule to be followed, nor is it a limitation to be challenged, but an interlocutor to whom every architect is required to explain the project. And contrast, when it arises from a project requisite and not from an intention to amaze, can become, in architecture, a more intense form of inclusion.